“CONNECTIVITY or where do we draw the line when stealing someone ideas”
I believe the difference between connecting with an artist and being influenced can be a very fine line. if i want to connect my work with an artist, or create work that is influenced heavily by a particular body of work, then i tend take an element of the work piece i have chosen, and work off of it, instead of mimicking it.
the first thing that comes to my mind when thinking about where to draw the line between inspiration and stealing ideas, is Rankin.
I watched an iPlayer Documentary , about Rankin taking on a very glossy high profile project in LA. He’s taken iconic images of Hollywood legends and mimicked them as best he could with modern stars. i wasn’t impressed, he’s just stolen photographs…entire photographs, the composition, the lighting, the textures within the image. and imitated them poorly i found it hard to believe that a project that came down to image theft even got on to TV
what pissed me off the most is that he didn’t even change a single element…he just turned up, pressed the shutter and walked off… to me, that's not connecting with anything. He had the chance to do something good. He could have portrayed the images differently, for example, breaking down what the photograph meant. and remaking images from the themes.
It just made me angry that he had all this funding and kit and people running around for him and didn't seem to give a toss about the image he was STEALING or the ones he was making. One of the most obvious values in old school Hollywood was beauty, I’d have looked at what beauty meant back then, and compare it to the present, compare Marilyn Monroe to Kate moss and see what that says about values. LA in the pictures then was all bright smiles, and real thighs. but in LA now, like Britain many women believe getting cut up for plastic surgery enhances beauty. Millions of people look at the fashion industry for body image, not understanding you CANT be curvy to fit the clothes, you cant even be normal. because it’s not about the model, it’s about the clothes, the models are just walking mannequins. that's our version of beauty.
Notions of Originality…
From the Lecture, Rob showed an explain of not knowing an artists work and re-creating it; “Johannes Vermeer - Young woman standing at a virginal - circa 1650’s” and “Hiroshi Sugimoto - After the music lesson”…this is possible, i’ve experienced it before, in previous documentary project…I used a 18-200mm zoom lens, and had taken head shots of people…it wasn’t until i showed my work to some one, and they then pointed out it reminded them of Philip Lorca Dicorcia’s heads series…my images weren’t exactly the same, pretty obviously because I didn’t have a massive light in a particular spot and waited for people to stand/walk underneath it…i just looked people dead in the eye through my camera and pressed the shutter quickly. :) (link head series)
